My Unusual View of Apple

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August 02, 2013

Our lives seem to be on a treadmill. Often just when we need to slow down, there is enormous pressure to speed up.

There will be few people who recognize the picture featured in this post. It is actually my great grandfather and grandmother from my mother's side of the family. I am guessing the picture was taken between 1900 and 1917. I am actually using it to represent another picture from a much more modern time. The newer picture has an interesting story and unfortunately my digital copy of it is buried on a computer that I have in storage.

First a little history will set the stage. In 1987 our family moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Columbia, Maryland. I was working for Apple and our Columbia based team was part of the Southern Operations group. That fall we had one of the many meetings which seem to define our life at Apple. At the time Apple had a very large distribution center in Charlotte, North Carolina and our sales group was also based there. Our meeting was in Williamsburg, Virginia and our director arranged for a picture to be taken of the whole group of well over one hundred people. The picture ended up in the Charlotte sales office.

Though I had been at Apple for three years, moving to the states taught me a quick lesson in working in corporations. When you move, you sometimes have to start all over again. That was certainly to be my experience over and over at Apple. Any new job meant that you had to prove yourself once again. In 1987, I had gone from being one of the top sales reps in Canada to just another sales rep face in the crowd.

Five or six years later I become a manager at Apple. If you are a keen Apple historian, you probably know that the nineties were a very interesting time at Apple. The company was pulling the rug out from under its own feet, and sometimes it was hard to tell where first base was much less who was on it.

As soon as I was promoted, I quickly moved my team from Columbia to the Reston, Virginia office. Being the low dog on the totem pole in that office, I was forced to share a cubicle with my area associate. The building housed something over 75 people focused on Apple's federal business. I did not mind sharing with my area associate since I spent much of time on the road visiting higher education customers who were spread from Pennsylvania to North Carolina. Roanoke, Virginia which became our home happened to be much closer to the geographic center of my customers than Reston.

Within the first year of moving to Reston, Apple closed the Columbia office and almost all of those folks disappeared. Next the Charlotte distribution center was closed much to the chagrin of our customers who loved the job that the Charlotte folks did. Not much over a year after my manager hired me, he lost his job and I ended up reporting to an office in Philadelphia. About a year after that I was the last manager standing in the North Carolina area and was given the job of closing down the Charlotte office.

As we were disposing of things I came upon the picture that was taken that first fall in Williamsburg. Almost all the managers in the picture and a great many of the people were no longer at Apple. The picture was in a pile that was slated to carted off to the trash bins. It was a large picture and I knew that I would get in trouble with my wife, but I hauled it home. The picture still meant something to me and I hoped that I could find a proper home for it.

If you fast forward a couple of years, I am no longer in charge of a higher education district but I have been given an enterprise district based in Reston, Virginia and it has the remnants of Apple's federal team which is down to one person. I am now in a stronger position so I take the picture to the Reston office and we find a spot to hang it though few people other than me in the office know anyone in the picture.

Fast forward another few years to 2002 or so, I am now the manager in charge of the Reston facility and we are building another federal team. The picture is on the wall but Apple decides to renovate the office space. I am worried that the picture which even fewer people can relate to will get thrown away. I take it back to Roanoke, Virginia where it stays tucked behind a filing cabinet.

In 2012, I have been gone from Apple for eight years. As we are moving from Roanoke and cleaning out the house, the picture once again surfaces. This time I am determined to find it a home. No one in my family knows anyone in the picture besides me and I am hard to find. It does not take me long to find the one person in the picture still working at Apple and within driving distance of our home. I call him up and arrange to have lunch with him and convince him to take the picture home with him. What will happen to the picture when he has to clean out his office is something I cannot let enter my mind. I have done the best that I can to honor the picture and the good memories that are attached to it. Apple never placed any value on it and actually fired or laid off almost everyone in the picture. Did I honor the picture by hanging onto it for twenty years even though much of the time it was not hanging on a wall? I like to think being behind my filing cabinet was better than ending up in a garbage dump.

It occurs to me that as a society we are singularly unskilled at preserving information about items that might have great sentimental value with just a little context. When we were cleaning our house out, we were also going through photos that we had inherited from my mother. There were many that no living relative could identify. I certainly could not put a name on them. Other than a handful that I saved for artistic value, we threw all of them away. I wish that the pictures had been labeled.

Our children have asked their mother to write down where many family items originated. We are working on that slowly. We are fortunate to have at least one young adult in the family who is very organized and loves to structure information and things.

When I was at Apple after my area associate had been with me for a number of years, she became the historian of things in our Reston office. Once Apple decided that they no longer needed her, I am certain that the knowledge that she had amassed disappeared. Corporations rarely care about their own history and institutions often do not take the time or make it a priority for people to write down things which might help others understand the significance of things like the picture that I protected for nearly two decades.

I have worked hard over the last few years, scanning pictures and documents and labelling them when necessary. I have also taken a number of pictures of important family items. On top of that I have written three books which have pictures of many of those same items and the people who are important to our family. The books will have great value to our family without ever coming close to being best sellers. Our family's story can be passed down from generation to generation as well as I could piece it together.

Perhaps graduating with a focus in history has made history important to me, but I worry that much of what we have as a society is losing value because the only ones who understand the true meaning of these things are dying off. There is so little effort to write down the important things that our elders know and which will disappear with them when they are gone.

Without a massive change which I do not see on the horizon, this is where our society is headed. We will be throwing things away that might well have helped to define us and explain why we are who we are. If we took the time we spend on Facebook or sending text messages, we could easily add a wealth of knowledge from the generation that will gone in the blink of an eye.

We all need to look around and see what is hanging on the walls. There are stories to be recorded and memories to be saved if we will only take the time.

May 19, 2013

My experience with exceptional cameras goes back to the Nikon F1 that I started using in 1969 when a college roommate and I headed off to Alaska.

Cameras have come a long way since then and some would argue that smartphone cameras are quickly on the way to replacing cameras.

Then there are those of us who believe the camera in your hand does matter if you are seeking to capture a memorable image. You can bombard me with all the advertisements that you want but you will not convince me that the photographs that we will remember twenty years from now will all come from smartphones. There will be some but there are times when having a real camera matters.

I made the decision to switch cameras because I was missing a lot of shots. The Nikon Coolpix could not focus fast enough to catch many of the birds that I chase during the winter months. I tried switching to my Nikon D3100 but I could not afford a telephoto lens to match the 36X zoom power of the Coolpix. Even if I could have come up with the money, it would have weighted far too much for the type of hiking that I do.

I came very close to ordering a Nikon Coolpix P520 but after reading several reviews, I chose to go with a Canon SX50 HS. There were a couple of factors but the two most important ones were the speed of focusing and the ability to take raw images. The battery life is also much better with the Canon. On hikes of four to five miles, I often ran out of juice on my Coolpix

While I am still learning some of the features of the Canon, it has been a fairly easy transition. About the only time that I really feel the need for my DSLR is when I want to take ocean wave pictures.

The 50X zoom on the Canon is amazing and I find that the image stabilization is very good. The camera is light weight, turns on quickly, and has enough custom settings to please me. I have not tried the video extensively but I have a video camera which I am more likely to use for video anyway. One feature that I love on the Canon is the silent mode for the camera. While many of the large egrets that I photograph seemed to hear the sound of the shutter in my Nikon Coolpix, the Canon in silent mode goes unnoticed.

The Canon lacks the GPS capability of the Nikon P520 but I have found a very satisfactory substitute through using MyTracks on my Android phone. I am able to import to the GPX file into Lightroom and sync the GPS data with my photos. It is a simple and elegant solution which avoids waiting for a camera to acquire a GPS signal. The GIS data in this album of a hike at the Point on Emerald Isle came from MyTracks on my LG Spectrum photo. The photos are from my Canon Powershot SX50 HS.

If you need a versatile camera that is light weight, quickly focuses, takes great pictures, and has an unbelievable zoom ability, take a close look at the Canon SX50 HS.

I have been a Nikon user for over forty years and this camera is one of the best that I have ever used. I paid only $389 for the camera. It is a fantastic camera for the money.

The camera was well worth the money and I think the shots that I got from it were welcome additions to our book, A Week at the Beach- The Emerald Isle Travel Guide. In our latest Kindle addition I sized the photos for optimal viewing on the latest tablets. The rich colors of the Canon and quick focusing are hard to beat in a camera in this price range.

March 26, 2011

There comes a time in most people's lives when if they are lucky, they try to do what they want to do instead of what they have to do. In saying that I am taking in the realities of 2011.

Often for people today doing what they want to do might not be playing golf everyday, it might be working at a job they enjoy instead of one they dread each morning. It also might mean working at a job that pays less but allows them to live in an area or spot that they love.

Maybe they are willing to give up vacations and fancy meals out to be near family or in place where family and friends love to visit.

Back in 2006, I got to the point that I was tired of living in the world of technology where your value is often in an inverse relationship to your age. The higher your age the less you are valued. In many tech companies, if you are over fifty-five, no matter how good you are at your job, there is a perception that it is impossible for you to stay on top of the technology.

I know a number of older people who care nothing for computers, but I also know some very technologically literate older people. However, those of us old folks who live and breath technology are not going to change the minds of the young who already know everything so my solution was to move on to a new career or perhaps more realistically a new portfolio of jobs.

While I work at real estate, it certainly has not been a career that can support my family in what continues to be a depressed market. So I have turned to other things to supplement our income including writing, technology consulting, and soon software services sales. And I have chosen to do all of these things in an area that nourishes my spirit.

I love the water, and as I continue to work hard at real estate and to develop alternate sources of income, I have made a conscious effort to do my jobs in a way that lets me enjoy where I live and the people around me.

My wife is strategically involved in my real estate work, and we often work as a team with her being an active listener with clients. It is a lot more fun that way than it was at Apple when she wasn't part of my job.

I make an effort to concentrate on clients who love the water and want to be near it. That lets me leverage my knowledge and love of the water. I also market heavily over the Internet. That lets me utilize my technology skills and often gives me reach to customers who might not find the area. I live to take pictures so I use those pictures to sell my talents and the listings of my clients.

I often end up with clients who love to fish and boat. Those two things happen to be my two favorite things. Also it is not unusual that I end up with computer literate clients since they usually find me on the Internet.

None of us are ever completely in charge of our lives, but in those areas where I have a choice, I have chosen those things that make me the happiest not the wealthiest.

If I pushed hard, I might well be able to get another high level sales job in technology. It would involve a lot of stress, plenty of travel, and a lot of reinventing the wheel. I might make a boatload of money, but I might also end up dead from the stress. I have chosen another road.

On top of enjoying our lives here, there is plenty of time for family. I get to enjoy my granddaughter, our children, and our extended family and friends. Watching my children master the challenges of life and learn how to be good to others in their lives is a much worthier goal that obessing over how high Apple's stock price will go.

There are afternoons here on the Southern Outer Banks where my office is either my skiff when I am fishing or my kayak when I am kayaking. Sometimes I am standing in the surf fishing when I get a phone call. It is not very hard to lose the stress, or tell someone you will get back to them later when a soft wind is blowing in your face, the warm Carolina sun is on your back, and a fish is pulling on the end of your line.

Life is too short to be miserable. I would rather smile a little and drive an older vehicle. My life certainly isn't worry free, but it is free of the kind of stress that comes from working in a technology company that is likely also a snake-pit of employees trying to out maneuver each other to the top.

When I stand on my dock each morning and survey Raymond's Gut which leads out to the White Oak River, I don't have to worry about irritating Steve Jobs or one of his empty suit vice presidents. I can stand on the dock and know that I have treated everyone like I would like to be treated. Once you have reached that point, it is pretty easy to let the cards fall where they may.

If things get tough, a walk along the beach or a ride down the river will usually cure it. If enjoying life can be considered a benefit, I have all the benefits that I need, and I never have trouble falling asleep at night.

September 25, 2009

I have used a lot of SLR cameras including Nikon & Leica. Since I switched to digital most of my cameras have been Nikon with a small Sony and a couple of Panasonic cameras. My kids have favored small Canon cameras.

I take a lot of pictures in demanding conditions, and I expect a lot from my cameras, My Nikon D50 has been a workhorse for several years.

Recently my pocket camera, a Nikon S9 died. I did not want to spend a lot of money, but I wanted wide angle and as much zoom as I could get.

I ended up buying a Pansonic Lumix DMC ZS-1 from Amazon for $240 before shipping.

The camera has 10.1 megapixels and 12X optical zoom plus 25mm wide angle capability. I have used it hard, and I am very pleased. I have done a number of interesting pictures with it, including the one in this post.

Because of its compact size it is my default camera these days.

I found it to be reliable and fast to focus. I have used the camera to take pictures one handed while driving my skiff.

I even recorded a video while sitting in a pew in our church. The camera was hand held with no tripod and no external microphone.

September 21, 2008

When you get to be nearly sixty years old, you have watched more than a few sunsets. I count myself very lucky to have seen some amazing sunsets.

My wife and I often play a game we call chasing sunsets. We try to predict where we will find the most spectacular sunset.

It turns out to be more art than science. We generally know the spots and the times of year for the best sunsets, but there is litte that we can do to prevent a cloud bank from stealing a sunset on us.

Still it is fun when we guess right and find a great sunset like we did this past Friday night. We had run over to Emerald Isle for dinner and on the drive back towards home noticed that the clouds were looking favorable for a good sunset.

Based on the time of year and the amount of time we had left before the sun would drop below the horizon, we headed to the Tideland Trails parking area of the Croatan National Forest.

It overlooks an inlet of the White Oak River. In the summer the sun is too far around the corner to provide a good sunset. Fall is another story as the sun moves down the White Oak the sunsets can be impressive.

There is a certain peace that a sunset brings to me. While the day's work is often not over, the sunset is a signal that the day is winding down and no matter how much work needs to be done, the time for work will soon be overtaken by the time for sleep.

Sunsets seem to linger. I find sunrises have to be instantly captured because the colors often change quickly. Yet a sunset almost invites contemplation and the savoring of the colors which seem to hang on much longer than those I see in the sunrises.

There is one other important thing about sunrises and sunsets. Most of the time, you are cold and/or damp when taking a sunrise pictures. Sunsets are dry and warm. That is the best way to end the day.

Today was cloudy, and I was standing in the water surf fishing at during the invisible sunset. At least the water was still warm which was no surprise since I had already tried the warm river waters in an afternoon kayaking trip.